An electoral campaign for the Parliament of Catalonia with heads of the list, party workers, advisers, commentators... and several murders. The expert in political communication Toni Aira (Barcelona, 1977) makes his debut in fiction with Cos a terra (La Campana, hits bookstores on Thursday), a crime novel in which Max Margarit, political adviser to number two on the list of transversal party, assumes the role of investigator to discover the murderer, a satire that portrays this underworld: between politicians, advisers and commentators, no one is saved.
Aira explains that it's like a catharsis: “As I live in this political-media bubble, I've killed them in fiction because I can't do it in reality, but with a sense of humor. In other words, without cruelty but with the idea of doing what many citizens might want and obviously shouldn't”. The campaigns and politicians, indeed, are an environment that he knows very well, because in addition to studying them, he worked for a year at the PDCat: "I had an irresistible temptation and it helped me to learn a lot but also to confirm that I am not cut out for this, among other reasons for the frustrations that my character explains. Thus, I have made a protagonist who starts with a lot of vocation but ends up very disappointed. Politics, like sausages, it is better not to see how they are made, they say that Adenauer or Bismarck said.
Throughout the novel, he describes the malaise that reigns within a party where daggers fly and everything is a struggle for power, as the title already reflects from the famous phrase by Pío Cabanillas: "Body on the ground that the our". According to the author, "in games that happens and everyone knows it, and in fact in the book the things that may seem most surreal are the most real."
All the characters have their load of suspicion, no one is saved. And it is that Aira defines himself as "a mystery novel patient": "I started reading with children's books, but also with Agatha Christie or Sherlock Holmes, and later also Montalbán, Camilleri, Simenon... They are references which for me are in the book, who does not want to recreate the lurid details, as is now quite the trend, but rather play the mystery, and the verb play is the key word ”.
And there is still another mystery: finding out which characters from politics and real communication it portrays. “Although there is no character one hundred percent taken from reality, there is the essence of many of them,” she explains. Since they make us cry most of the time, I wanted them to cry a little too, but above all to make us laugh, which is the idea of the book, along the lines of cozy crime, thinking of the recent novels in which Elizabeth II or Angela Merkel act as researchers. Are there deaths? Yes, it is a dramatic fact in itself, but the deaths are the excuse to explain a whole story. I wanted the novel to engage to follow the mystery, but to serve to make a portrait and a scan of politicians and commentators that surely few people know inside. Politics, after all, is a reflection of humanity: “Do you think that you, citizen, would do much better? My experience is that the misery of politics is human misery, and that is why it gives so much play. What happens in the campaigns is not so different from what happens in your house”. Now, although the critic is clear that "without politics there is no democracy, I try to be critical but not destructive, show the weaknesses of the world of politics but save the bottom."
For Aira, this experience as a narrative author has been surprising to a certain extent, because since he was little he used to make up stories: "I have a diary as a teenager in which I already killed teachers and students!" When they proposed to write a fiction, he immediately showed a scheme that he had been working on for years: "I wanted to kill politicians and social media, as an escape route," he says jokingly. At the same time, he assures that he is open to continue: “I already have ideas for new adventures, perhaps in the same world, because I think that not much has been touched on. Agatha Christie says that she created Miss Marple inspired by an aunt of hers who had the then great stigma of the single older woman, which would be a spinster, right? I have created Max Margarit, with a double stigma, because he is a consultant, people look at him with suspicion from the outset, and he is gay, which even today it is as if they could not be private investigators, there are still prejudices. It is an LGTBIQ friendly novel but with a lot of normality, without anything forced, I think. I am sick of detective novels, and this universe has not been very present, and even in many mystery films the gay character died early or was the most hateful. Well, here is an anti-hero who ends up breaking the mold for you: he has a certain courage, he is an adviser but he is not twisted, he is just disappointed in many things ”.
Catalan version, here
